Upstream - [TEASER] (Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, Robby here with another episode in our Patreon rating series. And I just upfront want to acknowledge, I know my voice sounds like shit. I'm like dealing with some kind of weird throat laryngitis thing. I think I'm not really feeling sick, but my throat has just been like, in a lot of discomfort and I haven't really been able to speak very well for the last like over a week now, but that's not going to stop me from coming on here and talking to you guys a whole bunch. So today's episode is going to be a reading on something that's been in the news a little bit more recently, which is sort of the rise of China, especially in terms of the rise of China as a competing entity to the United States.

Starting point is 00:00:54 We all know about the TikTok ban and of course it was reversed and we all know about at this point I'm assuming DeepSeek and China's forays into the AI world, which are putting the United States' AI world into shame. And yeah, so I figured I would talk a little bit about that before we have some actual experts come onto the show. I'd never like to promise anything with interviews because sometimes things fall apart or just don't end up working.

Starting point is 00:01:27 But I am talking to Jason Hickle right now about potentially coming onto the show to just talk China. And he has a research paper that recently came out, but also just more broadly too. Jason actually has quite a bit of knowledge when it comes to Chinese political economy. And so I think he would be a great guest to just sort of pick his brain about some of the recent developments and also ask him some bigger questions like is China capitalist? Is China imperialist? That kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:01:58 And then I'm also waiting for publisher of the books to send me the media copies. But Kenneth Hammond is going to hopefully be on the show as well to talk about a couple of his books on China. He's really great. And if you haven't already, I would check out Guerrilla Histories. I think it's like a four or five part series on China featuring him. He's incredible. So we're really looking forward to that. So yeah, we're making, you

Starting point is 00:02:26 know, this year is going to be featuring a lot of episodes looking at China. So I'm very excited about that. And I'm also looking forward to reading this piece, which shout out to Luke on Blue Sky, who actually recommended this to me and I skimmed it. I haven't read the whole thing yet. I like to do readings cold here sometimes. I think it adds more to it. But yeah, we're going to be reading a piece that is titled How Communism is Outcompeting Capitalism. And I'm probably going to take a few breaks just to give my voice a rest as we go through this. But this is by a blogger I believe named Indrajit Samarajeeva. And he's a writer known, I guess, as Indrajit or Indi or Jeet, or sometimes even Indica,

Starting point is 00:03:15 according to his website. And so that's where this comes from. The website is ind.caindica. So check out his work from this piece, which is the only writing of his that I've even looked at yet. He looks like he's got some good analysis. So let's jump right into it. How communism is outcompeting capitalism. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think? Immediately the Alanis Morissette reference there. Do with that what you will.

Starting point is 00:03:52 100 EV companies have bloomed under communism, while capitalism subsidizes one blowhard making four vehicles and one paperweight. A startup has trained an AI for $5.5 million under communism, while capitalist AI requires $500 billion in government support. Everything capitalists told you about capitalism was just some bullshit to sell you more capitalism. Communism is actually far more innovative than capitalism. They do more with less and for better purpose."

Starting point is 00:04:31 And just right off the bat, that's a great opening paragraph. I couldn't agree more with this analysis already and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I'm going to call him Indica because he has many names, what else Indica would like to say about communism and capitalism and China? So this subsection is titled, Long, Possibly Unnecessary Historical Digression. The great technical power of communism was actually known from the jump. Russia and China industrialized within one generation. No nations ever developed faster or more. An economic miracle pointedly ignored by most Western economists because

Starting point is 00:05:13 communism bad. Shut the fuck up. That's an italics communism bad STFU. The productive capacity of communism was discredited because the whole thing seemed to fall with the end of the Soviet Union. But that wasn't all. As Xi Jinping said in 2018, Historical development is never straight, but full of twists and turns. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe not only led to the disappearance

Starting point is 00:05:57 of the first socialist countries and the socialist countries in Eastern Europe, but also brought a serious impact on the vast number of developing countries that aspired to socialism, and many of them were forced to take the path of copying the Western system. Socialism in the world has suffered a serious setback, as the saying goes, quote, all flowers are scarce for a while. I have talked about the journey of socialism from empty thinking to science, from theory to practice, from one country to many countries.

Starting point is 00:06:32 It is worth studying in depth. History always evolves according to its own logic. The great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics in China shows that socialism has not perished, nor will it perish, and that it is flourishing with vitality and vigor. The success of scientific socialism in China is of great significance to Marxism and scientific socialism, and to socialism in the world. socialism and to socialism in the world. It is conceivable that if socialism had not achieved the success in China today, if the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and our socialist system had also collapsed in the domino change of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Soviet Communist

Starting point is 00:07:19 Party, and the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, or had failed for any other reasons, then the practice of socialism might again have to wander in the darkness for a long time, and again as a ghost, as Marx said, wandering in the world. And that's the end of the quote by Xi, and that's a really beautiful quote. I have to admit, I haven't read any of Xi Jinping's writings, and he can write.

Starting point is 00:07:48 And I definitely agree. And it's a very interesting take, because we talk a lot about the collapse of the Soviet Union as this great tragedy, right? Because the Soviet Union, amongst so many other things that it brought, it was a really important counterbalance to the capitalist world and to the West.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And we saw with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, just it ushered in this era that we're still in, the era of neoliberalism, the era of hyper-imperialism, as the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research has called it, and this sort of unabashed and unabated violent aggression by the West as it spread its tentacles all over the world. But China, China is a light in that, right? It's an island and it's an ever-growing island connected to other islands. And with the rise of bricks and the rise of this sort of reimagining of the alignments in the world, we're seeing the beginning of states standing up to Western imperialism and Western hegemony in a way that we would not have seen if China wasn't around, right?

Starting point is 00:08:54 And so say whatever you will about whether or not Chinese socialism is imperialist, it's not, or whether it's capitalist, it's not. But you can't deny that if it wasn't for China, the counterbalance that is put on Western imperialism, even if it's still not as strong as we would like it to be, that counterbalance would not exist and God only fucking knows how much worse the global situation would be. Okay, so that's the end of the Xi Jinping quote within this piece. Coming back to the

Starting point is 00:09:27 piece now. Luckily for the world, China was decoupling its model from the Soviet model before the Soviets fell and evolved something quite different and more robust. As Xue Mukiao said at a World Bank conference in 1982, and in parentheses, all of this is via how China escaped shock therapy by Isabella M. Weber. Read it. It's excellent. And the parentheses and into the quote that is being presented? Xue closed his speech by reminding the audience that China had learned a painful lesson when it copied the Soviet model. This mistake could not be repeated.

Starting point is 00:10:09 No change in abstract principles was needed, according to Xue. For the key question was how to reform in practice. China would not pursue indiscriminate or wholesale copying, but it would take the best from each country and find its own way. The chief Chinese insight was that the problem required Chinese insight. Chinese communism was branded socialism with Chinese characteristics, and with this highly experimental and adaptive economic system, Deng Xiaoping took China to market without selling off the whole hog.

Starting point is 00:10:49 Just jumping in real quick here, if you're not familiar, Deng was the leader of the PRC from 1978 to 1989 and he is very well known for this reformist period of like opening China up to a market economy. Some on the left hate him because they think that he betrayed communism and quote turned China capitalist. Others on the left, such as myself, understand that Deng and his reforms and opening up China was a lesson learned from the decline of the Soviet Union and that in order for China to exist within the capitalist world. They had to play the capitalist game they had to make sure that they weren't going up against the incredibly powerful United States one on one like the Soviet Union did and then ultimately to get crushed by the United States one-on-one like the Soviet Union did, and then ultimately to get crushed by the United States. And so the Dengist reforms, it understood the global situation and the concrete conditions

Starting point is 00:11:54 under which Chinese socialism had to survive. And it had a long-term view of building up the productive forces in China to a point where eventually they would out-compete the United States and eventually they could stand up face-to-face against the United States, which it's working. We're seeing that now. We're seeing that, I don't know if you could call it the end game, but part of this process play out very much in real time. As we see China's economy continue to grow, and actually by some estimates, it's already a third larger than the US's economy. China

Starting point is 00:12:36 continues to gain more and more trading partners as the US falls more and more into this insecure form of protectionism. And we're already seeing all of these shifts, all of these different states begin to align with China, the BRICS countries, and they're talking about de-dollarization and all sorts of other really interesting global implications to this long strategy of Deng. And like I said, it's playing out now and so that's just kind of my take on it. I'm going to get much more into this stuff with experts this year so we can look forward to that but for now that's my take on it.

Starting point is 00:13:16 So let's get back to the piece here. Uncle Deng predicted the trajectory quite presciently in 1987 in People's Daily. Poverty is not socialism. We must support socialism, but we must move ahead in building a socialism which is truly superior to capitalism. We must rid ourselves of the socialism of poverty. Although everyone now says we are creating socialism, it is only in the middle of the socialism of poverty. Although everyone now says we are creating socialism, it is only in the middle of the next century when we have reached the level of the moderately developed countries that we will be able to say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism

Starting point is 00:13:58 and that we are really building socialism." If anything, Uncle Deng was being conservative. We're only a quarter through the new century, and China already has higher life expectancy and living standards than capitalist America. The only thing that America leads on is GDP, which measures its corruption, debt, health fraud, and constant self-stimulation as positives, which they are not. In real economic terms like PPP, and just a quick aside here, PPP stands for purchasing

Starting point is 00:14:34 power parity, and it's essentially just an analysis metric that compares economic productivity and standards of living between countries. So in real terms like PPP, which is a superior metric than GDP, because GDP just measures growth and the growth that it measures can actually be directly antagonistic to well-being of the population. In real economic terms like PPP,

Starting point is 00:15:04 China already tops America and doesn't prioritize such blunt measures itself, preferring to look for high-quality growth than just making abstract numbers go up. As you can see, Chinese socialism is pragmatic more than programmatic. As Deng said in a 1962 speech, which pissed Mao off, when talking about fighting battles, comrade Liu Baosheng often quotes a Sichuan proverb, quote, it does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice, end quote. The reason we defeated Shanghai Shek, and just a quick aside here if you don't know who Shanghai Shek is, he was the leader of the sort of the counter revolutionaries or the other side of the

Starting point is 00:15:53 Chinese Civil War and they were beaten by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, which led to the People's Republic of China emerging out of that battle and him and his followers and that side of things, the counter revolutionaries fled to Taiwan and he was actually considered the legitimate head of China by the United Nations until 1971. So the reason we defeated Chiang Kai-shek is that we did not always fight in the conventional way. Our sole aim is to win by taking advantage of given conditions. If we want to restore agricultural production, we must also take advantage of actual conditions.

Starting point is 00:16:39 That is to say, we should not stick to a fixed mode of relations of production, but adopt whatever mode can help mobilize the masses initiative. At present, it looks as though neither industry nor agriculture can advance without first taking one step back." And so that's actually a really really interesting quote and I can't help but think of another passage that I just came across again, and I know I reference this book all the time. I'm still reading it. It's an incredible book, Torquil Lawson. You guys know I did the intro as a reading, and then we also had him on to talk about historical materialism. He's going to be back on again at some point to discuss this book

Starting point is 00:17:23 as I slowly make my way through it. I'm reading it along with a whole other bunch of books. So this is kind of I get to read a few pages here and there. But I came across this passage and it's from an article by Lenin that he wrote called On Ascending a High Mountain, The Harm of Despondency, the Utility of Trade, Attitude Towards the Mensheviks, etc. published in 1922. And this was during the period where the new economic policy was being introduced into the Soviet Union very early on in the Soviet Union's history, pretty much just five years

Starting point is 00:18:03 or so after the Bolshevik Revolution is when this was written. And when the Bolshevik Party decided that it was crucial to introduce market elements into the Soviet economy because the economy had just been shattered by civil war, by counter revolution and by the Great War or World War I. And so they decided as a party that they needed to introduce capitalism back into the Soviet Union as a way to bring the country out of poverty. And they did this in a way that, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:37 it wasn't like they were reintroducing capitalism into the entire economy. They just reintroduced certain elements of capitalism just to jumpstart the economy. And this passage in this piece by Lenin reminds me a lot of what we just read by Dang. So it's a little bit of a longer quote, but I think you'll get a lot out of it. It's really interesting. So on ascending a high mountain, and this passage goes, On ascending a high mountain, and this passage goes, Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep, and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers,

Starting point is 00:19:15 and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him had reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveler than the ascent.

Starting point is 00:19:54 It is easier to slip. It is not so easy to choose a foothold. There is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. Russia's proletariat rose to a gigantic height in its revolution, but not only when it is compared with 1789 and 1793, but also when it is compared with 1871. We accomplished the task of getting out of the most reactionary imperialist war in a revolutionary way. We have created a Soviet type of state and by that we have ushered in a new era in world

Starting point is 00:20:30 history, the era of the political rule of the proletariat, which is to supersede the era of bourgeois rule. Nobody can deprive us of this either, although the Soviet type of state will have the finishing touches put to it only with the aid of the practical type of state will have the finishing touches put to it only with the aid of the practical experience of the working class of several countries. But we have not finished building even the foundation of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it, for there is nothing more dangerous

Starting point is 00:21:05 than illusions and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes. And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency in admitting this bitter truth. For we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism, that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are alone in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others,

Starting point is 00:21:35 but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that, we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces. We have preserved its maneuvering ability, we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when, and how far to retreat in order to leap further forward, where, when, and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epic-making undertaking as completing the foundation of socialist economy, particularly in a small

Starting point is 00:22:12 peasant country, without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility to begin the beginning over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed, and in all probability will not perish." And so this was Lenin talking to other communists and socialists about why they decided to reintroduce capitalist elements into Soviet society as a defense of that. And he's basically saying in order to move forward, sometimes you have to take steps back, especially if you make mistakes or especially if you are in a situation that is like the situation that the Soviet Union and China exist in, which is a world dominated by Western capital, which is willing to do

Starting point is 00:23:10 whatever the fuck it takes to crush you. And so I thought that passage was very related and very interesting. And let us now get back to this essay. And I'm picking up after the quote by Deng ends. This was a clip from our Patreon episode, Chinese Socialism vs. US Capitalism. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll get access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more.

Starting point is 00:23:47 Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You will also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast. Thank you.

Upstream - [TEASER] (Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism

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